The Emblematic Elephant:
Elephants, the Dutch East India Company, and
Eurasian Diplomacy in the Seventeenth Century
Pichayapat Naisupap (Toh) Master Thesis
Supervisor: Prof.dr. Jos Gommans Colonial and Global History
Leiden University December 2020
Cover illustration: The VOC elephant emblem on the map of Colombo in 1659 (Source: TANAP, http://www.tanap.net/content/universities/sri_lanka.cfm)
Abstract
When the Dutch East India Company (VOC) came to Asia, its presence was contingent on relations with Asian polities. Elephant gift-giving was one of the practices the VOC conducted and experienced with Asian rulers alongside trade. The VOC acted as a giver and a receiver; it received gift-elephants from Southeast Asian polities plus Kandy and transferred them westward. This study examines the Dutch-Asian elephant diplomacy and sociocultural foundations behind the diplomatic scene during the seventeenth century. It argues that the existing Dutch acknowledgment of elephant gift-giving traditions and imaginations and perceptions of the emblematic elephant facilitated the elephant diplomacy between the VOC and Asian polities. In other words, these mentalities were integral to the commensurability in the Dutch-Asian elephant gift-giving. Furthermore, the case of the emblematic elephant imagined and perceived by the Dutch shows that the seventeenth-century historical change in worldview from emblematic to empirical was more nuanced and not linear.
Map
Table of Contents
Introduction 1
Commensurability without “Mirroring” 4
The Emblematic Worldview 7
The VOC and Its Elephants 14
Source Material 17
Chapter Outline 18
Chapter 1 Elephants and Long Gift-Giving Traditions: An Overview 21
The Long Traditions of Elephant Gift-Giving in Europe and Asia 22 Dutch Acknowledgment of Elephant Distributions and Gift-Giving Traditions 28
Conclusion 34
Chapter 2 Dutch Imaginations and Perceptions of Elephants 37
Between Justus Lipsius and Pieter Nuyts 38
Kings, Elephants, and Warriors 43
Pious and Virtuous Elephants 50
Anthropomorphizing Elephants 55
Empirical Elephant 59
The Elephant in a Nutshell 65
Chapter 3 Elephants and Early Modern Dutch-Asian Diplomacy 67
The Pattern and Characteristics of the Dutch-Asian Elephant Diplomacy 69
Honor, Reverence, Amity, and Unity 81
“The Peaceful Frequency” 85
Material Culture 88
Conclusion 92
Appendix I 102
Appendix II 104
Glossary 108
List of Illustrations
1.1 The gift-elephant offered by Portugal to Maximilian 25 1.2 The seventeenth-century tympanum of the city hall in Amsterdam 34 1.3 The seventeenth-century female personification of Asia by Cornelis van Dalen 36 2.1 The frontispiece of Lof des elephants by Pieter Nuyts 40 2.2 Verheerlijking van Willem de Zwijger by Hendrik Pot 45 2.3 Michiel de Ruyter and his elephant badge in 1660 48 2.4 The elephant in the Adam-and-Eve etching by Rembrandt in 1638 51
2.5 The Asian elephant executing the criminal 53
2.6 The print advertising about Hansken’s tricks 56
2.7 Elephants in the Dutch edition of John Jonston’s book 64 3.1 Past and present distributions of Asian elephants 70 3.2 The networks and two circuits of the Dutch-Asian elephant diplomacy 72 3.3 The quantitative data of Dutch-Asian elephant gift-giving practices 76
3.4 The painting dedicated to Federik Hendrik 86
3.5 The seventeenth-century goad from South India 90 4.1 The ill elephant with the deformed nails in the Thai elephant treatise 98 4.2 The composite elephant in the seventeenth-century Mughal panting 101 4.3 The composite elephant in Willem Schellinks’ oil painting 101 4.4 The composite elephant from the Thai elephant treatise 101
Introduction
“Animals are … not only good to eat, but good to think.” Claude Lévi-Strauss1
n 1641, the Siamese Phrakhlang (minister of external and trading affairs) of the Ayutthaya Kingdom in today Thailand sent a letter to Governor-General Antonio van Diemen (in office 1636-1645) and his Councilors of the Dutch East India Company (VOC, established in 1602) in Batavia. In the letter, the Phrakhlang on behalf of King Prasat Thong (reign 1629-1656) asked the VOC, among other requests, to make the paintings of the elephants: “seeing that some Dutchmen are excellent in the art of painting, we request Your Honour to have two elephants painted for our King, two asta high2 … in the most skilful way, and kindly have them sent hither … in haste.”3
Unfortunately, the painting did not survive to this day. However, this message shows how symbolically important the elephants were to the Siamese King and how reliable the VOC was to the Thai culture in imaging and perceiving elephants through paintings. In exchange, Siam also sent many fresh-and-blood elephants as gifts to the VOC. These mutual practices hint at how the Dutch imagined and perceived elephants and how their imaginations and perceptions involved the elephant diplomacy between the Dutch and the Siamese court.
1 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Le Totémisme aujourd'hui (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962), p. 128. cited in Halvard
Leira and Iver B. Neumann, “Beastly Diplomacy,” The Hague Journal of Diplomacy, 12 (2016), p. 339.
2 Asta was the local scale of units from the tip of the middle finger to the elbow. The word is also in Javanese hasta, which
derived from Sanskrit. In the Dutch East Indies, 1 asta equaled 42 centimeters. “VOC-Glossarium,” Huygens, http://resources.huygens.knaw.nl/vocglossarium/VocGlossarium/zoekvoc. The painting requested here is 84 centimeters high.
3 “Letter from the Phrakhlang on behalf of King Prasatthong (r. 1629-1656) to the Supreme Government in Batavia, 2
March 1641,” Document 21, in The Diplomatic Correspondence between The Kingdom of Siam and The Castle of Batavia during the
17th and 18th centuries (Arsip Nasional Republik Indonesia and The Corts Foundation, 2018), p. 8.
Diplomatic practices include what is performed on the diplomatic stage and inextricably associate with what behind the diplomatic scene. “The New Diplomatic History” has incorporated the wider cultural and social foundations of diplomatic practices into the legal, institutional, and political aspects thereof.4 Once the VOC had
set up its trading activity in Asia, the VOC’s presence was not aloof. Its power was “negotiated and contingent on relations between the Company and the indigenous states and polities in which the Company nodes were located.”5 In this condition, the
VOC unavoidably had to involve in the affairs of Asian polities to produce amity (and hostility) for conducting trade and establishing its (partial) sovereignty.6 In other words,
to achieve what the Company aspired, a diplomatic activity was needed. As the VOC-Siam case shows above, elephants played a significant role in Dutch-Asian diplomacy. But why elephants? The editorial book Global Gifts argues that gifts given on a global scale can illustrate “shared values and material and visual experiences.”7 What do
gift-elephants—including live and imagined elephants—tell us about these shared aspects between the Dutch and Asians? While being one of the elephant diplomacy players, the VOC was not only a giver, but many times it also received gift-elephants from Asian polities. The mutual practices of gifting elephants between the VOC and Asian counterparts can be examined along with Thomas R. Trautmann’s argument. He demonstrates how elephants were practically and emblematically related to kingship
4 Zoltán Biedermann, Anne Gerritsen, and Giorgio Riello, “Introduction,” in Global Gifts: The Material Culture of Diplomacy
in Early Modern Eurasia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 8.
5 Kerry Ward, Networks of Empire: Forced Migration in the Dutch East India Company (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2009), pp. 15-16.
6 For hostility, see how the VOC directed friendship during the early seventeenth century toward the native people in
South Land to gain more goods such as iron and copper and how the result turned out to be hostility and violence in Susan Broomhall, “Emotional Encounters: Indigenous Peoples in the Dutch East India Company's Interactions with the South Lands,” Australian Historical Studies, 45:3 (2014), pp. 350-367.
established across Eurasia.8 In this study, I will bring the emblematic aspects of
elephants to the forefront. Over the long run of history, elephants had great receptions in Eurasian imaginations and perceptions. Elephants in flesh and blood were transferred to menageries for empowering symbolic meanings of kingship/rulership over Eurasia. When the VOC practiced and experienced the elephant diplomacy with Asian polities by giving and receiving gift-elephants, the two worlds of elephant emblems became united.
This thesis studies when the two worlds of elephant emblems became united through diplomacy and sociocultural elements behind the diplomatic scene by only focusing on one particular agent, the Dutch East India Company. For the scope of the thesis, the Low countries—including and beyond the Dutch Republic—and the VOC networks in Asia are my spatial focus. The temporal focus is in the seventeenth century. Throughout the century, “the emblematic worldview”—discussed in detail below— enjoyed its life and paved the path for the diplomatic activities associated with emblematic animals to run on. The thesis examines (1) how the Dutch acknowledged elephant diplomacy, (2) how elephants were imagined and perceived emblematically and empirically by the Dutch, and (3) how these acknowledgments, imaginations, and perceptions influenced the elephant diplomacy between the VOC and Asian polities.9
It argues that the existing Dutch mentalities toward elephant gift-giving traditions and the emblematic elephant facilitated the way the VOC practiced and experienced elephant gift-giving activities because these mentalities were integral to the commensurability in the Dutch-Asian elephant diplomacy.
8 Thomas R. Trautmann, Elephants & Kings: An Environmental History (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2015). 9 By using imagination and perception, this thesis differentiates these two terms: the Dutch imagined elephants without seeing
them in fresh and blood; and perceived them alive when the elephants were transported to the Low Countries or the Dutch traveled to places where elephants were in persistence.
Commensurability without “Mirroring”
The previous studies regarding the Eurasian diplomacy between the Dutch East India Company and Asian polities emphasize the divergence between the two worlds (the “VOC world” and the Asian world).10 In their editorial book, Peter Rietbergen and
Elsbeth Locher-Scholten accentuate the interaction between Asian societies and the VOC. All articles in the book circle around the central question of the interactions between the indigenous rulers in Asia and the VOC.11 This interaction brings the
“culture” to the forefront of analysis by examining “the influence of the Asian thought over authority and religion, over contact, contract, and interpersonal relationships, over ceremonial and ritual … on the relations with the Europeans, economics, politics, and
diplomacy.”12 This way of analyzing implies that there were—at the minimum—two
cultural entities that were contrasting but interacted with each other in Eurasian diplomacy. Jurrien Van Goor also shows that the VOC envoys who were merchants acting as diplomats conducted diplomatic missions with an eye on exotic elements of Asian polities, even though he points out that “European and Asian diplomacy were in many ways similar, but had their individual characteristic as well.”13 Frank Birkenholz
cites Van Goor’s work and states that “the Company realized it had to mirror the political and cultural characteristic of Asian society” when conducting diplomacy.14 In
10 The term “the VOC world” I borrow from Nigel Worden (ed.), Contingent Lives: Social Identity and Material Culture in the
VOC World (Rondebosch: University of Cape Town, 2007).
11 Peter Rietbergen en Elsbeth Locher-Scholten, “Een dubbel perspectief: aziatische hoven en de VOC, circa 1600 - circa
1720,” in Elsbeth Locher-Scholten en Peter Rietbergen (red.), Hof en handel. Aziatische vorsten en de VOC, 1620-1720 (Leiden: Brill, 2004), p. 6.
12 Ibid., 5.
13 Jurrien Van Goor, Prelude to Colonialism: The Dutch in Asia (Hilversum, Uitgeverij Verloren, 2004), pp. 27-47.
14 Frank Birkenholz, “Merchant-Kings and Lords of the world: Diplomatic Gift-exchange between the Dutch East India
Company and the Safavid and Mughal Empires in the Seventeenth Century,” in Tracey A. Sowerby and Jan Hennings (eds.), Practices of Diplomacy in the Early Modern World c. 1410-1800 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), p. 221.
this thesis, I propose that in the case of elephant gifting, the VOC did not have to “mirror” or imitate because the existing mentalities toward the emblematic elephant helped the Dutch or the VOC in particular conceive the gift-giving practice.
In Guido van Meersbergen’s work, he shows how cultural commensurability is foundational to a successful diplomatic mission. He elaborates on the concept of commensurability in diplomacy:
… as has been established for a number of different contexts, multiple structural commonalities and ‘interconnected repertoires’ existed between court cultures across Eurasia, enabling diplomatic actors to recognize and engage with (if not always fully appreciate) one another’s ceremonial language and symbolic practices.15
However, when he uses this concept, his analysis is equivalent to the idea of “mirroring” cited by Frank Birkenholz in the same editorial book. Van Meersbergen takes the cultural commensurability of the Dutch as “learning” other customs and tastes through the adoption of social practice and interpersonal relations gained from the long-standing contacts with the more experienced Dutch and indigenous officials who had lived in a “strange” country for a long time. This explanation is not so different from suggesting that the Dutch had to mirror or imitate local cultures when conducting diplomacy. In this way, Van Meersbergen’s idea of cultural commensurability is merely a pretended commensurability. In the other work, he argues that ethnographic discourse was crucial for the approaches to cross-cultural trade used by the VOC and the East India Company (EIC). This work also emphasizes the importance of “learning” to gain
15 Guido van Meersbergen, “The Dutch Merchant-Diplomat in Comparative Perspective: Embassies to the Court of
Aurangzeb, 1660-1666,” in Tracey A. Sowerby and Jan Hennings (eds.), Practices of Diplomacy in the Early Modern World c.
more in-depth about other cultures, including the tradition of gift-giving.16 He gives an
example of that “experience in dealing with Mughal officials taught them [the Dutch] which items were in demand and they defined their gift-giving strategies accordingly.”17
In a nutshell, the bifurcation between cultures (Europe and Asia) is yet heard in his works.
Edward Said’s charm of Orientalism might have influenced the binary opposition between European and Asian cultures in historiographies. This monumental work deconstructs the Oriental images of the Western eyes by showing how a mode of discourse supported by institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, colonial bureaucracies, and colonial styles culturally and ideologically shaped the Oriental awareness of the Westerners.18 In turn, the concept has set a framework
analysis in academic research that emphasizes the clear distinction between the East and the West, which was hard to be reconciled when these two cultural entities met or clashed. An estrangement could be seen by the word Occidentalism revenging the ideas of imagining the East. The East and the West have become “enemies” of each other, and this could not be solved even by the history of diplomacy studied by the research mentioned above.19
Nevertheless, an attempt to harmonize the East and the West could be found in the field of global history. This attempt is part of the academic shift called “global turn” which looks and writes “events” in history from a global perspective. The phenomena that used to be deemed as distinctly European have been perceived in the global context and put forward to suggest that what used to be thought of as European movements
16 Guido van Meersbergen, “Dutch and English Approaches to Cross-Cultural Trade in Mughal India and the Problem of
Trust, 1600–1630,” in Cátia A.P. Antunes and Amelia Polónia (eds.), Beyond Empires: Global, Self-Organizing, Cross-Imperial
Networks, 1500-1800 (Leiden: Brill, 2016), pp. 69-87.
17 Ibid., p. 81.
18 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin Books, 2003).
could be found elsewhere outside Europe as well.20 For example, Peter Burke, Luke
Clossey, and Felipe Fernández-Armesto have globalized Renaissance. They point out that Renaissance characteristics such as philology, skepticism, and linear perspective existed globally and could be found in India, China, Japan, or the Islamic world.21 Jos
Gommans wrote a history of the relation between the Netherlands and India from 1550 under this “global turn.” He proposes that the Dutch and Indian cultures shared the corresponding worldview under Neoplatonism’s metaphysical concept as reflected in visual and textual arts.22
This study follows the footsteps of the “global turn” in writing history by focusing specifically on how elephants were imagined and perceived by the Dutch and how these imaginations and perceptions were essential in the Dutch-Asian elephant diplomacy. This thesis suggests that the VOC had existing vocabularies of the emblematic elephant when conducting elephant diplomacy with Asian counterparts or when confronting Asian elephants. These vocabularies were commensurable to both parties of the bilateral diplomatic practice. The VOC had no tabula rasa and did not have to “mirror” when it practiced or experienced the elephant gift-giving.
The Emblematic Worldview
This thesis depends on the central methodology on the concept of “the emblematic worldview” coined by William B. Ashworth, Jr.23 What is the emblematic worldview?
20 Peter Burke, Luke Clossey, and Felipe Fernández-Armesto, “The Global Renaissance,” Journal of World History, Volume
28, Number 1 (March 2017), p. 2.
21 Ibid., pp. 1-30.
22 Jos Gommans, The Unseen World: The Netherlands and India from 1550 (Nijmegen: Rijksmuseum and Vantilt Publishers,
2018).
23 William B. Ashworth, Jr., “Natural History and the Emblematic World View,” in Robert S. Westman and David C.
Ashworth cautions historians not to understand Renaissance natural history as we know from modern zoology and comparative anatomy and taxonomy. “The Renaissance view of the natural world was more densely layered and more intricately interwoven than ours.”24 In the world of emblems, every element of nature had myriad hidden meanings.
If one wants to know an animal, one ought to comprehend as many of its meanings as possible.25 The meanings were embedded in animals and represented through symbols,
fables, folklores, adages, or emblems. This worldview started to grow from the time of Conrad Gesner (1516-1565) when he published the Historia animalium in Zurich between 1551 and 1558 to the time of Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522-1605) who, as argued by Ashworth, brought the emblematic worldview of nature to fruition.26 However, we
should keep in mind that the emblematic worldview expressed itself through various avatars in varying cultures. This thesis uses this term to encompass all mentalities that looked at something as part of, dependent on, or associated with something another. Hidden meanings of things in each culture were influenced by the existing cultural elements. During the Renaissance and Age of Exploration, for example, the resurrection of classical texts and new discoveries shaped how one imagined and perceived the natural world. In other words, they were used as new similitudes to associate with existing things in nature.
Apart from the Renaissance and Age-of-Exploration influence, the Reformed orthodoxy also impacted how the Dutch contemplated the natural world emblematically. This contrasts with the image of the seventeenth-century Dutch scientific culture colored by concepts like “the Scientific Revolution” and “the
William B. Ashworth, Jr., “Emblematic Natural History of the Renaissance,” in Nick Jardine, James A. Secord, and E. C. Spary (eds.), Cultures of Natural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 17-37.
24 Ashworth, “Emblematic Natural History of the Renaissance,” p. 17. 25 Ashworth, “Natural History and the Emblematic World View,” p. 312. 26 Ashworth, “Emblematic Natural History of the Renaissance,” pp. 17-37.
Mechanization of the World Picture.”27 Eric Jorink shows that in 1634 “it has pleased
the great Lord to give us the Book of Scripture as a key or interpreter to the Book of Nature, in order that the first explains the latter.”28 In short, Scripture was the source and key
in comprehending nature.29 All creatures were also full of symbolic meanings, even the
minute ones like insects. The world of insects had deeply religious meanings. The metamorphosis from a caterpillar into a butterfly, for example, was a symbol of the Resurrection because it was believed that butterflies were born from caterpillars that had died.30 Also, butterflies symbolized love and purity, bees the social order, ants
industry, grasshoppers the devastating gluttony, etc. 31 Interestingly, elephants and
insects were often compared with each other. God manifested himself no less in the minuscule insects than the mighty elephants.32 Nonetheless, as shown in Chapter 2, the
emblematic elephant imagined by the Dutch had few similitudes related to Christian, but more to the great men in history.
Neoplatonism was another term resembling the emblematic worldview. Jos Gommans connects between the Low Countries and India with the Neoplatonic thread. He explained that Neoplatonism was “a systematic development of the Platonic contradiction between … ‘sensible,’ everyday material world and an unseen, intelligent
27 Jorink, “Reading the Book of Nature in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic,” in Klaas van Berkel and Arjo
Vanderjagt (eds.), The Book of Nature in Early Modern and Modern History (Leuven: Peeters, 2006), p. 45.
28 “Daerom heft het den goeden Godt belief tons te gheven het Boeck der Schrifture tot het Boeck der Nature, als Tolck ofte
Taelman van het selve / ‘t eene door het ander verclarende.” Dionysius Spranckhuysen, Macro-cosmus ofte aenmerckinghen over
de scheppinghe vande groote vverelt, soo als ons deselve beschreven wordt van Moses, Gen.1.v.1 (Tot Delf: de Weduwe van zal: Jan
Andriesz. Kloeting, 1634), p. 5. I use the translation by Eric Jorink in Jorink, “Reading the Book of Nature,” p. 49.
29 Jorink, “Reading the Book of Nature,” p. 53.
30 Jorink, “Between Emblematics and the ‘Argument from Design’. The Representations of Insects in the Dutch
Republic,” in Karl A.E. Enenkel and Paul J. Smith (eds.) Early Modern Zoology: The Construction of Animals in Science, Literature
and the Visual Arts (Leiden: Brill, 2007), p. 157.
31 Ibid., pp. 149 and 152. 32 Ibid., pp. 155 and 159.
world of abstract Forms.”33 This metaphysical perspective was not so much different
from the emblematic worldview in which material things were chained with something abstract. In another way, materials in the world of “phenomena” emblematically represented something in the unseen world that could not be seen by a physical eye but an intelligent eye. Elsewhere, Gommans and Said Reza Huseini use the chronicle
Tarikh-i Alfi, commissioned by the Mughal ruler Akbar in the late sixteenth century, to
suggest that the chronicle was composed of Neoplatonic elements reinforcing the universal kingship and imperial ideology of the commissioner Akbar. Gommans and Huseini point out that Neoplatonism encapsulating an all-inclusive monist theology was more requisite in the context of the Asian Arid Zone where the post-nomadic ruler like the Mughal exercised the political power than Europe where rulers were more sedentary.34 Azfar Moin also compares Akbar’s space with Europe (England) by
following Victor Liberman’s groundbreaking “strange parallels.” He suggests that the “exposed zone” influenced Akbar who had to compete with other Indic and Islamic competitors to incorporate an unrivaled element like Jesus to be part of his kingship. In contrast, in England, as situated in the “protected zone,” the kingship had the weaker form.35 However, although Neoplatonism was less prominent in politics in Europe,
Gommans and Moin illustrate how it was manifested more through art, literature, and drama.36 In South India, Gommans also suggests that, during the globalized period of
the early seventeenth century, the Nayaka states—the late Vijayanagar ruler Venkata II in particular—developed the cosmopolitan kingship along with Hindu monism that
33 Gommans, The Unseen World, p. 177.
34 See Jos Gommans and Said Reza Huseini, “Neoplatonic Kingship in Islam: Akbar’s Millennial History” in Azfar Moin
and Alan Strathern (eds.), Sacred Kingship in Global History (submitted to Columbia University Press, 2020). and Jos Gommans and Said Reza Huseini, “Neoplatonism and the Pax Mongolica in the Making of Ṣulḥ-i Kull: A View from Akbar’s Millennial History,” submitted to Modern Asian History (2020).
35 Azfar Moin, “Akbar’s “Jesus” and Marlowe’s “Tamburlaine”: Strange Parallels of Early Modern Sacredness,” Fragments,
Volume 3 (2013-2014), pp. 1-21.
“mingled so well with the dominant cosmological, Neoplatonic mood at the contemporaneous Mughal and Bijapur courts,” as expressed through the painted textile known as Brooklyn Kalamkari.37 To sum up, under Neoplatonism, resembled in various
forms, all things were integrated into one single entity. They added to it more meanings and made it more layered and hierarchical.
From the 1640s, the myriad meanings of nature under the emblematic worldview were challenged by Cartesianism. René Descartes (1596-1650), who lived in the Dutch Republic between 1628 and 1649, believed that nature was operated mechanically. Thus, nature was not composed of a cosmic array of references, analogies, and symbols.38 It was from the same time that the study of insects started to get rid of
symbolic meanings. Thanks partly to the invention of the compound microscope around 1620 by the Dutch inventor Cornelis Drebbel (1572–1633),39 misapprehensions
of insects were debunked. The “king” of bees was actually a queen, which ironically deprecated the patriarchal social order. The discovery that the organs of the future butterfly were in a caterpillar’s intestines also disproved the symbol of Resurrection. However, the discoveries of nature did not mean to depreciate the Great Creator’s power. On the contrary, to appreciate his grand design honestly, one should understand the rational description of nature. “Wonder was now evoked by the marvelous design of [creatures], and not by their hidden qualities, deeper meaning, and symbolic value.”40
Also, Ashworth suggests that during the second half of the seventeenth century, the emblematic worldview in Europe declined. Natural history began to focus more on description and anatomical investigation, with the classification system’s purpose.41
37 Jos Gommans, “Cosmopolitanism and Imagination in Nayaka South India,” Archives of Asian Arts, Volume 70, Number
1 (April 2020), pp. 1-21.
38 Jorink, “Reading the Book of Nature,” p. 57.
39 Jorink, “Between Emblematics and the ‘Argument from Design’,” pp. 153-154. 40 Ibid., pp. 161-163.
Animals were stripped off of their similitudes; they became “naked, without emblematic significance.”42 Ashworth attributes the decline of the emblematic worldview to animals
from the New World, antiquarianism, and Baconianism. The first one is due to the New-World animals that had never been known to the Old World. Thus, these animals had no known similitudes. All they could be comprehended was physical description and pictures.43 At the end of the sixteenth century, antiquarianism in the northern
countries in Europe changed quite differently compared to Italy. It was because northern countries had no classical, canonical histories like the history of ancient Greece and Rome, which had already been written by “historians” since classical antiquity. Antiquarianism in northern Europe aimed to gain historical truth by reconstructing the historical artifacts such as coins, inscriptions, and the remaining Roman roads. Natural historians were exposed to the new ideas of antiquarianism and saw animal symbolism as not capable of gaining truth.44 Lastly, Francis Bacon’s Sylva
Sylvarum was published posthumously in 1627. His natural history idea had “nothing of
Imagination” and he considered the emblematic worldview as invalid.45 Animals in the
new worldview started to be intelligible by themselves, not anymore by similitudes in God’s cosmos.
Nonetheless, Ashworth’s argument was framed in a linear perspective, not to mention that the “cultural survivals” and circumstances of the emblematic worldview in Asia are ignored.46 Until the nineteenth century, as demonstrated by Trautmann,
elephants were still perceived and represented through the lens of cosmic emblems
42 Ashworth, “Natural History and the Emblematic World View,” p. 318. 43 Ibid., pp. 318-319.
44 Ibid., pp. 319-322. 45 Ibid., pp. 322-323.
46 The term “cultural survivals” is from Peter Burke. He elaborates that “[a] cultural history of revolutions should not
assume that these events make everything new. … [A]pparent innovation may mask the persistence of tradition. There should be a place in the story for cultural survivals.” See Peter Burke, What is Cultural History? (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), p. 126.
related to religions and kingship.47 Although Gommans points out that Mughal India’s
Neoplatonic world was gradually disenchanted since Islamic scholars distanced themselves from Neoplatonic mysticism and considered it non-Islamic, he insists that its “cultural survivals” continued to live until the colonial rule with the re-imported Enlightenment disrupted the Neoplatonic worldview significantly in the nineteenth century.48 This corresponds with the arguments by Trautmann and Sujit Sivasundaram
in the case of the emblematic elephant. Trautmann argues that the introduction of the teak industry by the British colonial power brought an end to elephants’ symbols related to the royal war and kingship.49 Sivasundaram shows that, in the middle of the
nineteenth century, anthropomorphic views of elephants gave way to an objective and Christian science of animals.50 Chapter 2 in this thesis will also show that the
emblematic worldview toward elephants was still well received by the Dutch throughout the seventeenth century. Even though there emerged a new empirical worldview, some of the empirical elements were employed to stress the elephants’ emblematic qualities associated with kingship and piety. Thus, I propose that the change from the emblematic to the empirical worldview in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic was more nuanced and not linear. We can say that the elephant enjoyed their symbolic meanings in the emblematic worldview across early modern Eurasia.
When the VOC men came to Asia, they carried the emblematic vocabularies for elephants along with other goods. They on the one hand still upheld the emblematic worldview, although on the other hand they were merchants who “valued the search for exact description of natural things as they could be grasped by the senses, allowing
47 Trautmann, Elephants & Kings. 48 Gommans, The Unseen World, p. 241. 49 Trautmann, Elephants & King, pp. 318-339.
50 Sujit Sivasundaram, “Trading knowledge: The East India Company's elephants in India and Britain,” The Historical Journal,
comparison alteration and use for material betterment.”51 As shown in Chapter 2, those
merchants had their scholarly resources like books from Europe at hand, and they used them to contemplate the natural world from which their lucrative merchandise emerged. They thus were Janus-faced: one trade-oriented and another emblematic. These two contrasting but complementary mentalities affected how the VOC men imagined and perceived things in nature.
The VOC and Its Elephants
Elephants were important to the VOC in terms of trade and gift-giving diplomacy. Lodewijk Wagenaar states that until around 1750 “some ninety to a hundred elephants a year were shipped to South India. The elephants were not only traded commercially; there was also an old tradition of giving these animals as gifts.”52 The emblematic
worldview played a role for both aspects, but to a significant degree for the latter. Elephant possessed some emblematic qualities which were commonly perceived by and communicated with peoples. Their tusks also held a considerable value as ivory.53 To
achieve a high profit and a successful diplomatic mission, elephants in possession of the VOC must have the required, good emblematic qualities. All physical attributes such as height, tusks, ears, tails, and nails were taken into consideration when the VOC had to trade and give the elephants.
The VOC was one of the participants involved in trading elephants. The elephant trade had a long practice before the VOC came to Asia. Before the VOC was able to
51 Harold J. Cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2007), p. 6.
52 Lodewijk Wagenaar, Cinnamon & Elephants: Sri Lanka and the the Netherlands from 1600 (Nijmegen: Vantilt Publishers,
2016), pp. 159.
53 Martha Chaiklin, “Ivory in Early Modern Ceylon: A Case Study in What documents Don’t Reveal,” International Journal
control Ceylon tightly in 1658, it had negotiated with local polities such as Aceh to have a hand in the elephant trade.54 After 1658 when the VOC ousted Portugal from the
island, the VOC began to establish itself as the direct ruler of peoples and territories in the lowlands of the island.55 Ceylonese elephants were also deemed to be under the
VOC’s control.56 In 1689, the VOC made a record of all Ceylonese elephants in the
Company’s possession that were sold at Jaffanapatnam since the year 1658. As seen in appendix I, the record separated elephants into two categories, which are “elephants” (tusked elephants) and “aliassen” (elephants without tusks).57 Jaffanapatnam was situated
to the north of Wanni region. Hendrick Zwaardecroon, Commander of Jaffnapatam, said in his memoir that elephants from Galle, Matara, and other places in Ceylon were sent to this region and sold at considerable profit.58
Elephants were animate. They had an agential capability.59 Unlike the other bred
animals, elephants were generally born wild and later domesticated.60 Their presence
required human action in handling them. Elephants could even rampage the lands and harm people’s lives. Some places in Ceylon were garrisoned by toepasses (Christian natives) under the command of Dutch Sergeant for preventing the incursion of these
54 Sher Banu A.L. Khan, “Aceh-India Commercial and Literary Relations in the Seventeenth Century,” in Pius
Malekandathil (ed.), The Indian Ocean in the Making of Early Modern India (New Delhi: Manohar, 2016), p. 156.
55 Sinnappah Arasaratnam, Dutch Power in Ceylon 1658-1687 (Amsterdam: Djambatan, 1958), p. 21.
56 Generale missiven van gouverneurs-generaal en raden aan heren XVII der Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, Deel III: 1655-1674,
uitgegeven door Dr. W. Ph. Coolhaas (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968), p. 225.
57 VOC 1479, Sommarium van alle s’ comp. Getande en ongetande eliphanten die verkoght zijn, t’ sedert van jaere anno
1658 tot 1689 en hoe veel deselver gerendeert hebben tot Jaffanapatnam, fol. 542r-542v.
58 Hendrick Zwaardecroon, Memoir for the Guidance of the Council of Jaffnapatam 1697, translated by Sophia Pieters (Colombo:
H. C. Cottle, Government Printer, 1911), p. 5.
59 See Jonathan Saha, “Colonizing Elephants: Animal Agency, Undead Capital and Imperial Science in British Burma,”
BJHS Themes, 2 (2017), pp 169-189.
60 Martha Chaiklin, “Elephants and the Making of Early Modern India,” in Pius Malekandathil (ed.), The Indian Ocean in the
wild animals.61 To have the elephants shipped as merchandise when trading or gifts
when conducting diplomacy, the VOC had to possess the elephants in its stables and corrals. This required an act of finding and taming elephants and also a deep interest and management.62
The knowledge of how to catch elephants was circulated well in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. The places in Ceylon where elephants were collected were in Jaffna, Matara, and Galle.63 The Dutch minister Philip Baldaeus, who used to travel to
Jaffna, recounted in detail how elephants were captured in Ceylon:
They fix abundance of large Stakes or Trunks of Tree in the ground, so as to leave the Entrance wide enough, bat growing narrower within by degrees; in these they have certain Traps, and the wild Elephants being decoy’d by the tame ones into these enclosures, are catch’d in the Traps or Snares … They are very hard to tam’d, and require sometimes four whole Months before they can be brought to lie down: All this while they must be carried twice a day to some River or other to swim. This is done by putting a wild Elephant betwixt two tame ones, who take such care of the other, that they hit him from both sides with their Trunks, till they make him pliable, and at last quite tame.64
Another narrative by the Dutch writer Elias Hesse also shows “how the elephants in Ceylon were tamed and caught by Hollanders.” Hesse wrote that the elephant hunt in Ceylon involved more than a hundred people equipped with snares, axes, shovels, spades, and “animal-like tools.” Once setting up a big corral, the hunters went to the
61 Zwaardecroon, Memoir for the Guidance of the Council of Jaffnapatam 1697, p. 85.
62 Jane Buckingham, “Symbolism and Power: Elephants and Gendered Authority in the Mughal World,” in Piers Locke
and Jane Buckingham (eds.), Rethinking Human-Elephant Relations in South Asia: Conflict, Negotiation, and Coexistence (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 103.
63 Wagenaar, Cinnamon & Elephants, p. 157.
64 Philip Baldaeus, A True and Exact Description of the Most Celebrated East-India Coasts of Malabar and Coromandel as also of the
isle of Ceylon, translated from the High-Dutch printed at Amsterdam, 1672 (New Delhi, Asian Educational Services, 1996),
forest and hit the drums and cymbals to frighten elephants and let them run into the corral.65 We know from Zwaardecroon’s memoir that those involved in elephant
hunting activities were local peoples. They had the head called “Master of the Hunt” who usually adopted the Portuguese names.66
The notable VOC places for receiving and keeping elephants were Batavia and Dutch Ceylon. In Batavia, elephants sent from other places such as Siam, Kandy, Arakan, and Pegu as gifts were taken care of by slaves. They cleaned and gave food to the elephants. Also, they had to repair the elephants’ stable once it was worn out.67
Pieter Nuyts, the Governor of Taiwan, wrote in his treatise about elephants that the animals ate rice and drank water.68 In Ceylon, the VOC had to deal with many elephants
since Ceylon was a place where the VOC could obtain many of them from their natural habitats in the forest. In another record, the VOC listed all elephants that were caught in Matara in 1689 and were caged in different corrals. Interestingly, all the elephants had names in the local language which were probably given by indigenous elephant keepers.69 This also shows the corroboration between the Dutch and local agents in
managing elephants.
Source Material
This thesis conducts its research for the most part by using two kinds of primary sources. Firstly, the “public archive”—to which I mean books and visual arts circulated
65 Elias Hesse, “D’ aenmercklycke reysen van Elias Hesse, nae en in Oost-Indiën; van ’t jaar 1680 tot 1684” in Drie Seer
Aenmercklijcke Reysen nae en door Veelerley Gewesten in Oost-Indiën, vertaeld door S. De Vries (Utrecht: Willem vande Water,
1694), p. 212.
66 Zwaardecroon, Memoir for the Guidance of the Council of Jaffnapatam 1697.
67 Generale missiven van gouverneurs-generaal en raden aan heren XVII der Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, Deel I: 1610-1638,
uitgegeven door Dr. W. Ph. Coolhaas (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), p. 431. 68 Pieter Nuyts, Lof des elephants (Delf: Arnold Bon, 1670), p. 111.
in the public sphere in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic—will be the main sources for the first and second chapters. Published books consulted in this thesis were written originally in Dutch and translated from Latin. The notable books about elephants are the works by Justus Lipsius and Pieter Nuyts written in encomium style. The latter had experience of serving the VOC. Visual arts used in this study range from paintings, engravings, tympanum of a building to material culture such as an elephant goad.
The second type of primary sources is the “VOC archive” which circulated within the Company’s enclosed circle. The VOC sources—transcribed and published during the colonial period in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—will be used meticulously in Chapter 3. These sources are Dagh-Registers and Generale Missiven in which various elephant diplomatic practices with Asian polities and implications behind were recorded. This thesis also consults some of unpublished VOC manuscripts which are found in National Archives of the Netherlands (Nationaal Archief) and inventoried in het
archief van de Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC), 1602-1795 (1811).
Chapter Outline
This thesis is organized into three main chapters and a conclusion plus epilogue. The first chapter investigates an overview of a long history of elephant distributions and elephant gift-giving practices across Eurasia and how the Dutch acknowledged these phenomena in the seventeenth century. This chapter shows that in the public sphere the Dutch acknowledged how elephants were brought to Europe and how they were used as gifts in the diplomatic missions between one sovereign and another. In this chapter, we will also see that the VOC was aware of elephant gift-giving practices between Asian polities and the implications behind the practices.
The second chapter will examine how elephants were imagined and perceived by the Dutch during the seventeenth century. Lipsius’ and Nuyts’ works will be used very thoroughly. These two writers’ works will be compared with each other and with works and arts circulated contemporarily. While Lipsius’ writings represent general mentalities toward elephants of peoples in the Low Countries, Nuyts’ treatise about elephants can be seen as the imaginations and perceptions of a person under the VOC service. However, these two mentalities were complementary and paralleled. These existing mentalities were the vocabularies that the VOC employed to apprehend and communicate when conducting and experiencing the elephant diplomacy in Asia. This chapter also shows that the two competing worldviews—emblematic and empirical— existed simultaneously in the Dutch Republic, and this indicates that the worldview shifting during the early modern period was hardly dramatic and linear.
The last chapter explores how the Dutch-Asian elephant diplomacy was practiced during the seventeenth century. It will not only focus on the Dutch side when the Dutch acts as an elephant giver because the VOC frequently acted as a receiver. This chapter will show the general pattern and characteristics of the Dutch-Asian elephant diplomacy and how gift-elephants were signified when they were given to the other party. The significations of elephants in diplomatic practices implied in the VOC records can be read along with the Dutch acknowledgment of elephant gifting traditions in Chapter 1 and imaginations and perceptions toward elephants in Chapter 2. In this way, this chapter builds upon the first and second chapters to argue that the existing Dutch mentalities shown in the previous two chapters facilitated the Dutch-Asian elephant diplomacy during the seventeenth century and were fundamental to the commensurability between the two parties in bilateral diplomatic practice.
The conclusion will summarize the general ideas discussed in the three chapters. It will bring this thesis into dialogue with previous studies on the history of gift giving by showing how the study of the Dutch-Asian elephant diplomacy can contribute to
this historical research field. The conclusion also has an epilogue that will propose future research investigating the human-animal relations between the VOC and elephants. Furthermore, future research can study in-depth how Dutch imaginations and perceptions toward elephants were compared, connected, entangled, or disparate to/with Asian counterparts. This can be brought into dialogue with the concept of “connected histories.”70
70 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia,” Modern Asian
Studies, Vol. 31, No. 3, Special Issue: The Eurasian Context of the Early Modern History of Mainland South East Asia,
Chapter 1
Elephants and Long Gift-Giving Traditions: An Overview
lephants had a long reception across Eurasia. While elephants could be naturally found in Asia, elephants never roamed around in European forests. To make their presence in European countries, men brought them from the original habitats located in Asia (especially in India, Ceylon, and Southeast Asia) and sub-Saharan Africa. From antiquity, they were brought predominantly on land to Europe through conquests and warfare by the Hellenic and Hellenistic empires and later by the Romans. They began to be mainly shipped by sea during the expansions of Portugal and Spain in the sixteenth century. Since the classical era, elephants have been given as gifts across Eurasia. The elephant gift-giving traditions did not limit the pattern of giving only between Europe and Asia. The traditions dynamically happened within Europe between one sovereign and another as did in Asia. These phenomena left their footprints through ink on historical documents or images in visual arts.
This chapter will explore an overview of a long history of the distributions of elephants and elephant gift-giving traditions across Eurasia and how the Dutch acknowledged these phenomena during the seventeenth century. This chapter has two parts. The first part gives a history of the elephant distributions and how the traditions of giving gift-elephants emerged from them. The second part will discuss how the Dutch acknowledged when elephants were transported to Europe before the seventeenth century and how they were aware of diplomatic activities regarding gifting elephants across Eurasia. This chapter suggests that the Dutch had the existing acknowledgment of elephant gift-giving traditions when the Dutch East India Company or the VOC performed the elephant diplomacy whenever it played as a giver or a receiver.
The Long Traditions of Elephant Gift-Giving in Europe and Asia
Donald F. Lach argues that Europeans gained their first experience on elephants when Alexander of Macedon (r. 336-323 BC) defeated Darius III of the Persian Achaemenid Empire (r. 336-330 BC) in 332 BC because, after the victory, Alexander captured 15 elephants from his Persian enemy.1 Lach suggests that one of these elephants might
have been observed by Aristotle in his History of the Animals.2 However, Thomas R.
Trautman states that Aristotle based his work partly on the works of Ctesias of Cnidus.3
Trautman also proposes that Alexander might have been familiar with Ctesias’s work, which had an account of Indian war elephants because the Macedonian conqueror knew how to dilute the deployment of war elephants when waging war with the Persian at the Battle of Gaugamela.4 Throughout his eastward campaign to India, elephants from
defeated polities were presented to Alexander as gifts and tribute.5 From Alexander’s
time, elephants started more and more to capture the European imaginations.
Elephants became acquainted with the Romans when the Greek King Pyrrhus of Epirus (r. 297-272 BC) invaded Italy during the third century BC. His troop composed of elephants won the victory over the Romans. However, the Romans could later defeat the Greek army under Manius Curius Dentatus. Four elephants from the Greeks were brought to Rome and put in the triumphal procession. In 251 BC, the consul Lucius Caecilius Metellus waged war against Carthaginians at Palermo in
1 Donald F. Lach, “Asian Elephants in Renaissance Europe,” Journal of Asian History, Vol. 1, No. 2 (1967), p. 135. 2 Ibid., 135.
3 Ctesias was a Greek scholar who lived in the Greek city Cnidus in Caria, which was part of the Persian Achaemenid
Empire.
4 Thomas R. Trautmann, Elephants & Kings: An Environmental History (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2015), p. 223. 5 Thomas R. Trautmann, “Towards a Deep History of Mahouts,” in Piers Locke and Jane Buckingham (eds.), Conflict,
Negotiation, and Coexistence: Rethinking Human-elephant Relations in South Asia (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016), p.
southern Italy. After the victory, he brought over 100 African elephants to Rome. Their mahouts (elephant keepers)—who were, as Lach suggested, probably Indians or trained by Indians—were integrated into the Roman service as well. Elephants from Metellus’s time became increasingly involved with the Roman sociocultural life passing into the
Anno Domini years.6 The way the Romans integrated the elephants into their realm
resembled the way the Greeks made themselves familiar with the elephants; they warred against others who possessed elephants or conquered the lands where elephants were present and then brought the elephants back to their realms.
In the Middle Ages, Eurasian elephant diplomacy was increasingly practiced. At the beginning of the ninth century during the early Middle Ages, the Abbasid Caliph Harun-al-Rashid sent an elephant to Charlemagne (748-814), the Emperor of the Romans. The elephant was called Abul-Abbas and disembarked at Pisa in 801.7 In the
biographies written after his death, Charlemagne enjoyed friendly relations with foreign nations. The narratives of Charlemagne’s relations with the distant nations to the East gained wide currency throughout the Middle Ages. They were employed to serve and shape the political schemes of the monarchs and empire during the High Middle Ages. In the Low Countries at the turn of the fourteenth century, the Flemish poet and chronicler Jean d’Outremeuse also recounted the arrival of the diplomatic elephant Abul-Abbasfrom the country in the East.8 In 1255 Louis IX of France sent an elephant
as a gift to Henry III of England after traveling back to France from the Holy Land in the previous year.9 The Holy Land was an area which was part of the Near East where
6 Lach, “Asian Elephants in Renaissance Europe,” pp. 137-138. 7 Ibid., p. 141.
8 See Anne A. Latowsky, Emperor of the World: Charlemagne and the Construction of Imperial Authority, 800-1229 (Ithica: Cornell
University Press, 2013).
the distribution of elephants had taken place because this geographical unit had been divided and ruled separately by the Diadochi or Alexander’s successors.10
When the Portuguese gained a foothold in Asia during the early sixteenth century, they could reach the elephants. With Portuguese’s contacts made with Asian polities, the Portuguese might have received gift-elephants from Asian sovereigns, as in the case of Ceylon.11 Further, the elephants were sent as presents to Portugal to King
Manuel I (r. 1495-1521).12 In this way, Manuel conducted himself similar to the Indian
rulers. He began to collect elephants and built a stable for keeping them near Estaus Palace in Lisbon. Manuel sent elephants as diplomatic gifts to several sovereigns in Europe, including the Pope. In 1514, Manuel sent an Indian elephant accompanied by the embassy and a Hindu driver to Pope Leo X (papacy 1513-1521). The Pope was delighted and so much fond of this gift-elephant. The Romans later named the elephant Hanno. The Pope became emotionally attached to Hanno. He even had great mental suffering when Hanno was ill and sorrow when Hanno died in 1516.13 Almost 40 years
later, in 1552, another Indian elephant was bestowed to the Archduke Maximilian of Austria (the eldest son of Ferdinand I, the Holy Roman Emperor) by King John III of Portugal (r. 1521-1557). The elephant was transported to Vienna, where Maximilian had been recalled to after stationing in Spain for many years.14 Due to the Portuguese
presence in Asia, the great distribution of elephants to the West—to which I would term as “the second westward elephant distribution”—occurred again since Alexander and his Diadochi had initiated.
10 Trautmann, Elephants & Kings, pp. 223-243.
11 Felicity Heal, “Presenting noble beasts: Gift of animals in Tudor and Stuart diplomacy,” in Tracey A. Sowerby and Jan
Hennings (eds.), Practices of Diplomacy in the Early Modern World c. 1410-1800 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), p. 193.
12 Donald Ferguson, “The Discovery of Ceylon by the Portuguese in 1506,” The Journal of the Ceylon Branch of the Royal Asiatic
Society of Great Britain & Ireland, Vol. 19, No. 59 (1907), p. 298.
13 Lach, “Asian Elephants in Renaissance Europe,” pp. 148-152. See also Silvio A. Bedini, The Pope's Elephant (London:
Penguin Books, 2000).
Figure 1.1 The gift-elephant offered by Portugal to Maximilian
(Source: British Museum, https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1928-0310-97)
The elephant distribution also expanded to northern Europe via gift-giving practices. In 1562, Portugal sent an Asian elephant to Maximilian who would succeed his father and become the Holy Roman Emperor in 1564.15 The elephant took the
journey to the Emperor through the Low Countries. As Jan Mollijns’ broadsheet produced contemporarily (Figure 1.1) shows, the elephant arrived first in Brabant:
“[o]ne saw me in Brabant, now throwing first steps. So I went on land to the Emperor.” From the broadsheet, we also see probably the Indian mahout which was written as “the Moor” riding on the back of the Emperor’s gift-elephant.
After the 1580 succession crisis in Portugal, Philip II of Spain (1527-1598) was crowned to sit on the Portuguese throne as Philip I of Portugal. Now, he officially took the Portuguese role in conducting elephant diplomacy. During his coronation, he received an elephant and a rhinoceros as gifts from Lisbon. A decade later, he sent a gift-elephant to France’s new Bourbon King, Henry IV (r. 1589-1610). In turn, Henry IV sent an elephant across the English Channel to Queen Elizabeth of England (r. 1558-1603) in 1592.16
Asian states and polities were indeed not unfamiliar with elephant gift-giving traditions. Although elephants in China had retreated southward due to the “pressure” from human economic activities such as clearing forests for farming throughout Chinese history,17 elephants still made their way to China by Southeast Asian kingdoms,
where elephants were persistent. As shown in the Ming Shi-lu (a daily chronicle of the Ming dynasty ruling from 1368-1644), embassies from Annam, Champa, Cambodia, Siam, and Java were sent to China bearing tribute, which frequently consisted of living (and sometimes white) elephants. In 1386, for example, the Kingdom of Champa (Southern Vietnam) presented 54 live elephants to the Chinese Emperor on his birthday. The record also shows that the mahouts occasionally accompanied the gift-elephants as tribute to China.18 In Japan, elephants rarely made their way to the island.
Nevertheless, in 1597 an elephant named Don Pedro was sent as a gift by the Spanish
16 Ibid., p. 172.
17 The clearing-forest pattern for agriculture in China was different from India and Southeast Asia, where the human
economic activities compromised with environment. See Trautmann, Elephants & Kings, Chapter 1. and Mark Elvin, The
Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).
18 Thomas R. Trautmann, “Towards a Deep History of Mahouts,” p. 159. Also see Geoff Wade (translator), Southeast Asia
governor of Luzon in the Philippines, Don Luis de Navarrete Fajardo, to the Japanese daimyo Toyotomi Hideyoshi. The elephant had been trained to be able to trumpet. Hideyoshi was seemingly pleased by the gift-elephant and fed melons and peaches to the animal.19 Besides China and Japan, as we will see later, elephant gift-giving practices
were energetic among Asian polities, and these activities could not avoid being noticed by the VOC through its records.
The tradition of giving (white) elephants sometimes did not end up in amity, but war. During the latter half of the sixteenth century, Pegu (Hongsawadee) in nowadays Myanmar demanded two white elephants from the Siamese Kingdom (Ayutthaya). This clearly did not express an equal relationship between Pegu and Siam; Pegu saw itself superior to Siam by demanding two white elephants that could be deemed as tribute. King Chakkraphat of Ayutthaya (r. 1548-1564) therefore refused to do so, and “replie[d] in royal friendship to [his] royal younger brother … [that] it is an ancient tradition that, whoever has a sufficient abundance of merit to become a supreme monarch, will have [among other things] precious elephants.” He ended a letter by saying that “[m]ay our younger brother not be inclined to feel slighted.”20 Chakkraphat was clear that he did
not want to send white elephants to Pegu because the act of sending implied the inferior status of his kingdom according to the concept of gift-elephants as tribute, and it would diminish the sacredness and perfection of his kingship. In contrast to the complimentary close of Chakkraphat, the King of Pegu felt very slighted and later attacked Siam with the result of Pegu’s victory. This white-elephant war became well known to the Dutch.
19 Martha Chaiklin, “The Merchant's Ark: Live Animal Gifts in Early Modern Dutch-Japanese Relations,” World History
Connected, Vol. 9, No. 1 (February 2012), https://worldhistoryconnected.press.uillinois.edu/9.1/chaiklin.html.
20 The chronicles states that King Bayinnaung of Pegu was a younger brother to King Chakkraphat because King
Bayinnaung was born in 1516, while King Chakkraphat was in 1509. David K. Wyatt (ed.), Richard D. Cushman (translator), The Royal Chronicles of Ayutthaya (Bangkok: The Siam Society Under Royal Patronage, 2000), pp. 42-43.
Dutch Acknowledgment of Elephant Distributions and Gift-Giving Traditions
During the seventeenth century, the Dutch were aware of the historical occurrences regarding elephant distributions and elephant gift-giving practices from Alexander’s era to the seventeenth century. Books about elephants published contemporarily in the Dutch republic mentioned these phenomena in the past. Historie vanden Elephant (History of the Elephant)—written by Justus Lipsius (1547-1606) and published in Dutch in 1621—provided the long history of elephants from the Hellenistic period to the time after the Portuguese landed in India. Alexander was deemed in Lipsius’s work to be the first who had brought elephants to Europe: “Alexander first had the elephants in Europe.”21 In the other version, he cited the Greek traveler and geographer Pausanias
to articulate that “Alexander has been the first who had the elephants among Europeans … he brought or sent them to Europe.”22 In Historie vanden Elephant, Lipsius continued
telling the history of elephants during the Roman Republic: “Pyrrhus transferred [elephants] to Italy. … Metellus at a time caught 142 [elephants] and sent [them] to the City [Rome].”23 In the work about elephants by the VOC governor Pieter Nuyts
(1598-1655), he pointed out that after Lucius Caecilius Metellus conquered the elephants from Carthage, fears of the Romans toward elephants diminished.24 Because of these lesser
fears, Nuyts continued that “one hundred forty-two [elephants] that the Romans had overcome were brought in the theater inside Rome.”25
Moreover, Lipsius also acknowledged “the second westward elephant distribution” initiated by the Portuguese. He wrote that “the Portughijsen opened those
21 Justus Lipsius, Historie vanden Elephant (’s Gravenhaghe: Aert Deuris, 1621), fol. 4v.
22 Justus Lipsius, “’t Lof van den Olyphant,” in Veeler wonderens wonderbaarelijck lof (’t Amsterdam: Samuel Imbrecht en
Adam Sneewater, 1664), p. 139.
23 Lipsius, Historie vanden Elephant, fol. 4v.
24 Pieter Nuyts, Lof des elephants (Delf: Arnold Bon, 1670), p. 75. 25 Ibid., p. 76.
lands [in Asia] for their sailing, in the lands that those animal[s] [were] manifold.”26 Not
only referring to the “the olden Writers”27 from classical antiquity to the Middle Ages,
the text also depends much on the contemporary work of Cristóbal Acosta (1525-1594), the Portuguese natural historian, who “… is well-informed of that new World where one names East-Indies … [and] lived there for long, saw [and] wrote among other things not a little matters about the Elephant which [he] saw by himself or has an understanding of the one that they saw because that Animal is very numerous in those places.”28
The sixteenth-century elephant diplomacy conducted by European sovereigns appeared in the Dutch published books. The book Toonneel der wereltscher zaaken (Theater of the world occasions), published in 1659, narrates a story of the elephant Hanno “that was sent as a gift by Emanuel [Manuel] the King of Spain to the Pope Leo X”29 in 1514.
In volume 3 of Triomph der Pausen van Roomen (Triumph of the Popes of Rome) published in 1681, it states that King Manuel I of Portugal sent an ambassador “to offer obedience to [Pope Leo X]” and “revered him with a present of two elephants.” The elephants would be “… pleasant to many Romans because since the triumphal processions and public shows of the ancient Romans, Elephant was never seen by the Romans.”30
Furthermore, he sent another ambassador and elephant, which was probably Hanno, to the Pope. When they arrived at the Papal Palace, the Pope sat at a window, “the elephant … bent the knees three times and bowed his body as showing reverence.”31
26 Lipsius, Historie vanden Elephant, fol. 4v. 27 Ibid., fol. 10r.
28 Ibid., fol. 5v.
29 J. Sanderum, Toonneel der wereltscher zaaken (Dordrecht: Abraham Andries, 1659), p. 106. In this quote, “Emanuel [Manuel]
the King of Spain” is anachronistic given that during the time of Hanno in 1514 Portugal and Spain were the separate polities. Nevertheless, when Toonneel der wereltscher zaaken was published, the Iberian Union between Spain and Portugal under the Spanish Crown had already been established almost 80 years ago in 1580.
30 P. Cornelivs Hazart, Triomph der Pausen van Roomen, het derde deel (’t Antwerpen: Michiel Knobbaert, 1681), p. 186. 31 Ibid., pp. 186-187.
The gift-elephant sent to Maximilian in 1562 also captured Lipsius’ eyes. He wrote that “[we] who have hardly ever seen [the elephant] in this our whole century (I mean the one the King of Spain sent to the Emperor in the year 1562).”32 The pronoun we which
was employed by Lipsius might suggest the popularity of this gift-elephant to his general readers.33 In addition, the sentences in Toonneel der wereltscher zaaken and Lipsius’ work
might be an anachronism given that the two writers mistook the King of Portugal for “the King of Spain” due to the Iberian Union that combined Spain and Portugal under the Spanish Crown between 1580 and 1640.
The transfer of elephants in Ceylon to Europe appears in the VOC record through the Dagh-Register of Batavia Castle. The Dagh-Register in 1641 attaches the Dutch translation of the answers by Rajasinha II of Kandy (r. 1635-1687) in Portuguese to “the King of Spain.”34 The question number 26 refers to the request of “the King of
Spain” to possess the elephants: “the Spanish King has … yearly 4 elephants with tusks and 50 without tusks from the province of Matura [Matara].”35 Rajasinha continued,
“the King of Cotta [Kotte] was a brother in arms with the King of Spain, he bestowed the lands that [had] belonged to him to the King of Spain.”36 Rajasinha obviously talked
about what had happened in the sixteenth century because the Kingdom of Kotte had ruled Matara and had dissolved at the end of the sixteenth century when King Dharmapala of Kotte granted his Kingdom to Portugal in 1597. Elephants which “the King of Spain” acquired were also probably granted to him as gifts. Again, “the King of Spain” here was also the King of Portugal because, due to the Iberian Union, all the
32 Lipsius, “’t Lof van den Olyphant,” p. 139.
33 Lipsius’ elephant treatise had been written before the flesh-and-blood elephant from Ceylon arrived in the Netherlands
in 1633. See Michiel Roscam Abbing, Rembrandts Olifant: In het spoor van Hansken (Amstelveen: Leporello Uitgevers, 2016).
34 Dagh-Register gehouden int Casteel Batavia vant passerende daer ter plaetse als over geheel Nederlandts-India, Anno 1640-1641,
uitgegeven door het Bataviaash Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen, met medewerking van de Nederlandsch-Indische Regeering en onder toezicht van Mr. J. A. van der Chijs (’s Hage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1898), p. 408.
35 Ibid, p. 416. 36 Ibid.
